A handful of high-ranking Obama administration officials this month
delivered private briefings at the annual invitation-only conference held
by an elite international organization known as the Bilderberg group.

The closed meeting of some of the most powerful business, media and
political leaders in North America and Western Europe heard from top Obama
diplomats James Steinberg and Richard Holbrooke, who detailed the administration’s
foreign policy, while economic adviser Paul Volcker, chairman of President
Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, also gave a presentation at the
heavily guarded seaside resort in Greece that hosted the event.

The Bilderberg group, which takes its name from the Dutch hotel where
it held its first meeting in 1954, exists solely to bring together between
100 and 150 titans of politics, finance, military, industry, academia and
media from North America and Western Europe once a year to discuss world
affairs.

Its ultra-exclusive roster of globally influential figures has captured
the interest of an international network of conspiracists,
who for decades have viewed the Bilderberg conference as a devious corporate-globalist
scheme.

This year’s closed-press meeting, held at the five-star Astir Palace
hotel in Vouliagmeni on the Aegean Sea about 25 miles south of Athens,
marked the 57th gathering of the opaque organization.

The publicity-shy Bilderberg group – which in a rare mass-circulation
press
release last year described itself as “a small, flexible, informal
and off-the-record international forum in which different viewpoints can
be expressed and mutual understanding enhanced” – has no website and participants
are asked not to publicly discuss the proceedings.

But a meeting attendee tells POLITICO that Holbrooke, a State Department
special envoy, briefed attendees on the Obama administration’s unified
approach to dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, gave a presentation on the
administration’s broader foreign policy and National Security Agency Director
Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander also participated in the conference.

An assistant to Volcker said she did not know the subject of his presentation
at this year’s meeting. A White House official stressed that Volcker is
not a full-time employee and wasn’t representing Obama in Greece. The White
House, State Department and NSA did not respond to questions about whether
Alexander, Holbrooke and Steinberg – all repeat Bilderberger attendees
– were representing the Obama administration at the meeting and whether
tax dollars paid for their travel.

Steinberg, it should be noted, was in the region on official business
for talks with officials from Greece, Macedonia and Montenegro, on the
eve of Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to other Balkan states: Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia.

Though Bilderberg tends to attract mostly former U.S. government officials,
it’s not uncommon for sitting officials to attend.

Bilderberg stalwart Henry Kissinger, who’s attended more than half of
its meetings, reportedly went at least twice during his stint as Secretary
of State, while Alexander attended last year’s session as NSA director.
In 2004, then-Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) attended the Bilderberg conference
in Stresa, Italy, and both TIME magazine and the New York Times reported
that his performance at a debate there played a role in his selection one
month later as the vice presidential running mate for Democratic presidential
nominee Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

But any suggestion that Bilderberg is secretly anointing world leaders
or plotting global policy is the provenance of “the black helicopter crowd,”
the attendee of this year’s conference told POLITICO.

The meetings are “one of the least well-kept secrets in the world” and
“don’t have any decision-making authority,” said the attendee, who did
not want to be identified breaching Bilderberg’s off-the-record rule. The
attendee called Bilderberg “a useful group of people who are well-connected
and thoughtful who put on these meetings and usually invite a few people
from the [U.S.] administration to come so they understand what the administration
is doing.”

Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, who attended the
2007 and 2008 Bilderberg meetings and until recently sat on the steering
committee
that picked invitees, did not respond to a request for comment about how
invitees are selected.

Other American participants at this year’s conference included World
Bank President Robert Zoellick, billionaire Bilderberg regular David Rockefeller,
academic Barnett Rubin and leading neoconservatives Richard Perle and Paul
Wolfowitz, according to the attendee, who added that Greek Foreign Minister
Dora Bakoyannis and Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis also attended.

British
press confirmed that top U.K. official Peter Mandelson was there.

Geithner was in New York, said Treasury spokeswoman Heather Wong. “I
don’t know how that [Bilderberg rumor] got out there. I had some foreign
press calls asking me where he was last weekend, but I didn’t have any
domestic calls.”

Indeed, the gathering produced barely a blip in the American mainstream
media, with the only notable dispatches coming from a Wall
Street Journal reporter who was barred entry to the usually publicly
accessible Astir Palace hotel, and an Associated
Press reporter who noted that it was being protected by “hundreds of
police, navy commandos, coast guard speedboats and two F-16 fighter planes.”

As in past years, the near-absence of mainstream media coverage left
Bilderberg-veil-piercing duties to a group of self-styled Bilderberg hunters
whose reporting and speculation fill fringe, libertarian-leaning websites,
newspapers and AM radio shows popular with those whose worldview is characterized
by a deep and angry suspicion of the ruling class rather than any prevailing
partisan or ideological affiliation.

“Leaked Agenda: Bilderberg Group Plans Economic Depression,” blared
a headline
early this month on the popular website Infowars, which is run by syndicated
radio talk show host Alex Jones.

The story was based on reporting by veteran Bilderberg sleuth Daniel
Estulin, whose sources told him Bilderbergers were torn between whether
to initiate “a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to
decades of stagnation, decline and poverty … or an intense-but-shorter
depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order,
with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”

Estulin, the author of “The True Story of the Bilderberg Group,” claims
to have infiltrated Bilderberg, and he told POLITICO that “in the end,
the shorter-intense crowd within the Bilderbergers won out and so we’re
going to be looking at a year, a year-and-a-half of really intense financial
meltdown.”

Estulin, who was the first to report the precise location of Bilderberg
2009 (though in late 2007 he also reported
that U.S. intelligence was considering assassinating Texas GOP Congressman
and libertarian icon Ron Paul), declined to email POLITICO a copy of the
pre-meeting booklet on which his story was based.

Both Estulin and Jim Tucker, another veteran Bilderberg hunter, insisted
that Geithner—who Infowars reported
was “to take orders from global elite at Bilderberg”—attended this year’s
conference.

Tucker, who edits the nationalist American Free Press newspaper, traveled
to Greece to report on last weekend’s Bilderberg meeting. He says he’s
been on the sidelines of about 30 of the meetings. At this year’s event,
two of his reporters were confronted
by the Greek Navy when they rented a boat to try to take photographs of
beachside Bilderbergers from the sea, he said.